The following are the (un)official guidelines for our research group’s conduct when publishing:

1. The most important rule is proper citation. Mistakes and misinterpretations can be fixed, accidentally ripping someone off or making impactful statements without supporting evidence will have long term consequences. That includes any bombshells Dr. Thoma casually drops in the middle of a conversation. Make him provide a source, and if he hasn’t written it down somewhere citable, either make him publish something to quote or provide an experiment that can prove his statement. Just because he said something does not mean you don’t have to prove it.

2. There are no specific rules as to the formatting of publications. Choose a font and spacing that looks professional, suits the nature of the publication and does not have symbols that can be misread given the subject matter. Professor Chandler already got a complaint from someone who misread the chemical formula for chlorine as being the empirical chemical formula for hexaiodobenzene and burnt their eyebrows off because in Arial, a small L looks to a large I.

Edit 1: Yes, that means that Comic sans is off the table.

3. Be reasonable when choosing whom to name as co-authors. You can name near-sapient familiars and enhanced pets as co-authors, but if you do so, make sure to make it possible for the reader to tell that they’re not available for, say speaking at a conference.

Edit 1: this came up because of F. D. C. Willard. In 1975, a physicist named Jack H. Hetherington wrote a solo paper that included the phrase “we” a few times and was told that wasn’t acceptable for a paper written by a single person.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Because changing that would have been a lot of work in those times, he decided to put down his cat Chester as a co-author. To avoid anyone who knew his cat from noticing, he used the scientific name (Felis domesticus) as part of a fictitious name and used the cat’s father’s name (Willard) as a false surname. The whole thing got exposed when F. D. C. Willard was invited to speak at a conference.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard#cite_note-Zankl-1)

Edit 2: If you put down a familiar, tell me. Someone just invited Brisa M. Mina to speak at a conference about the paper on “Familiar Evolutions through Raid Boss Aspects”, which she co-authored. Apparently, they didn’t read far enough to realize that the “M.” stands for Microraptor and that she signed with a clawprint. I don’t know the names of everyone’s pets, so I won’t always be able to immediately reply to such a message with “that’s someone’s familiar”.

4. When giving scientific names to newly discovered species, please take that seriously, scientific names are almost impossible to change, even if they’re racist or otherwise unprintable. If there’s an appropriate joke to make, I won’t stop you, but please keep the joke names to one in ten.

Edit 1: Here’s an example of a good joke name: The “Mini” genus of frogs, whose scientific names are “Mini mum”, “Mini scule” and “Mini ature”. (Schertz et al., 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_(frog)).

Edit 2: Yes, that man’s name is indeed the German word for “prank”.